A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online Page B

far more important than an ordinary agricultural dwelling and, not wishing to trespass, she retraced her steps. Finding a door in an ivy-covered wall, she entered a walled garden and here for the first time encountered a gardener—a bent old man pottering among the broken frames who acknowledged her greeting so ill-temperedly that she went out again, walked through the stable yard, passed an overgrown tennis court—and saw behind it a curiously shaped clump of yew hedges, irregular and dark.
    Or course. A maze… She had heard the maze at Stavely mentioned: a famous one, as intriguing and clever as that at Hampton Court. Jokes had been made about it on the bus and Mrs. Brandon, in her letter, had forbidden the ladies to enter it.
    "Harriet! Harriet, where are you?"
    Aunt Louisa's high petulant voice in the distance sent Harriet quickly forward and unhesitatingly she entered the maze.
    It was very silent between the yew hedges, which almost closed over her head; on the mossy paths her light feet made not the slightest sound. The idea of a labyrinth had always alarmed Harriet and the story of Theseus and the Minotaur had been one of her favorite ways of terrifying herself as a child, but now she wandered unhurried and in peace for it seemed to her that there were worse things than to be abandoned in this green and secret place.
    Which didn't mean that she was not lost. All the theories that people had about turning always to the right or always to the left did not seem to be very good theories. She wandered on, twisting this way and that, disturbed by nothing except a nesting blackbird which flew up from the hedge. And then, quite without warning, she took a last sharp turn and round herself in the circular sweep of grass which constituted the core, the very heart of the labyrinth.
    "Oh!" exclaimed Harriet, startled.
    For sitting on a stone bench beside the mildewed statue of a faun was a hunched figure so small, so self-contained that it might have been the spirit of the maze itself. Then it looked up, as startled as she was, and Harriet saw a small boy with dark red hair and a pale, rather pinched little face almost covered by a large pair of spectacles. A child of about seven years of age trying to shield, with hands woefully too small for the task, a large black book.
    "I'm so sorry," said Harriet in her low, soft voice. "I didn't mean to disturb you, I expect you wanted to be alone."
    "Well, yes, I did," said the boy, now pressing the book against his diminutive sailor-suited chest. He looked at the girl standing in front of him. She was a grown-up—he could tell that because her blue skirt touched the ground—and grown-ups could make trouble; but as he stared at her anxiously, she smiled—a terribly friendly, crunched-up sort of smile—and he knew that it would be all right, that she would not betray him. "But I don't mind as long as you don't tell anyone. I'm not supposed to read this book, you see. It's forbidden."
    "I promise not to tell anyone," said Harriet. She came over and sat down on the bench beside him, noting with a pang the fragile, elderly-looking legs, the feet in their black strap-shoes hanging so high above the ground. "I was always reading Books I wasn't supposed to when I was little. I used to tie a piece of cotton to my toe and to the door handle, so that when someone came in my toe twitched and I had time to put the book under my pillow before they saw it."
    "Did you?" The boy was impressed, lifting his spectacles a moment to look at Harriet. His eyes were unexpectedly beautiful: large gray eyes with a golden rim round the iris. "My name is Henry," he now offered. "Henry St. John Verney Brandon."
    "Mine is Harriet Jane Morton," said Harriet, realizing without undue surprise that she was in the presence of Stavely's heir. And solemnly, for they were both people of great politeness, they shook hands.
    It was then, their credentials exchanged, that the child lowered the book and laid it carefully in